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Introduction
The landscape of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is evolving at an unprecedented pace. As organizations strive for greater efficiency and agility, new tools, strategies, and paradigms are emerging to address the challenges of managing complex infrastructures. From the rise of open-source projects like [OpenTofu](https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu) to the growing influence of AI in infrastructure workflows, 2025 promises to be a transformative year for IaC.
This article explores key trends shaping the future of IaC and what they mean for organizations and teams worldwide.
The Rise of OpenTofu Continues
OpenTofu has been on an impressive growth trajectory, and this trend will accelerate in 2025. Organizations are increasingly validating OpenTofu as a viable alternative to Terraform. The project's rapid feature development and open-source ethos make it more appealing to a greater audience.
At Terramate, we have observed a striking statistic: about 20% of greenfield projects now begin their journey with OpenTofu. This shift underscores its growing influence.
Multi-IaC Gains Traction
Especially large organizations are adopting team-specific workflows with different tools and approaches for managing IaC. Operational teams most frequently rely on Terraform , OpenTofu, and Terragrunt for infrastructure provisioning. In the past, different team preferences have often led to internal conflicts, as standardizing around a single IaC technology has been the default mode even for larger organizations, which, on occasion, has led to nasty politics.
With new orchestration tooling, the ops teams can be polyglots, i.e., adopt multiple IaC technologies in different teams and still share an orchestration and observability layer to (a) deploy infra changes with consistent unified pipelines and (b) have a 360° overview of what is going on in IaC managed infra across all repos and cloud accounts. So expect a lot less IaC technology politics.
Repatriation of IaC Pipelines
CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD have become powerful and capable of handling complex tasks. Infrastructure state and deployment artifacts can now be tracked and maintained between pipeline runs without using any specialized stateful CI/CD tools for IaC, weakening the case for purpose-built IaC CI/CD platforms.
This advancement allows teams to simplify their technology stacks by consolidating infrastructure and application workflows under a single, unified pipeline while reducing dependencies on niche tools.
Open-source orchestration tooling such as Terrateam, Digger and Terramate are designed to specifically enhance any general-purpose CI/CD with advanced orchestration, collaboration and observability capabilities. These tools allow teams to build and manage striking delivery workflows for IaC in their existing CI/CD.
Developer self-service enablement
Developers often find that the infrastructure knowledge needed to test and deploy their services is too complex and requires additional work in addition to knowing how to build the software itself, effectively causing cognitive load.
Platform Engineering promises to resolve this challenge by abstracting most of this infrastructure complexity by providing opinionated tools and workflows that enable developer self-service with developer portals and platform orchestrators.
A promising solution gaining traction—and set to accelerate this year—is providing software developers with pre-built building blocks designed by platform engineers to address recurring use cases called infrastructure service catalog. Developers can select templates (provisioning a database, CI/CD template, etc.), customize a few parameters and get the piece of infrastructure using a few clicks, which satisfies their organization's standards. Examples of developer portals that provide these features are Backstage, Port, and Humanitec. Another interesting contender specifically built for Terraform and OpenTofu to watch in 2025 is Resourcely.
The impact of LLMs and AI
AI tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor are reshaping how teams write code, accelerating development processes by providing LLM-powered code generation and prompt-based programming.
Leading organizations such as Google report that 25% of “all new code” is already written by AI, which is a clear indication of the productivity gains organizations can get from adopting new and emerging tools. LLMs such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT or Anthropic’s Claude AI will become more powerful and deliver better results, meaning adopting them will become a non-negotiable for developers.
However, generating more code also creates more challenges. Ensuring that generated code is secure and compliant is particularly important when dealing with infrastructure, requiring teams to adopt tools such as Trivy, Checkov and Terrascan to validate the integrity of generated IaC.
Emergence of IaC AI Agents
2025 will likely see the rise of DevOps-specific AI agents designed to handle routine infrastructure management tasks like searching logs, creating new infrastructure, and issuing access. By automating repetitive activities, human operators can focus on higher-value work.
While the space is still in its early stages, it’s inevitable that more startups like Kubiya will emerge to make DevOps and Platform engineering-specific AI agents more accessible for teams.
Platform Teams Get Their Due Recognition
Emerging tools provide metrics to quantify the value platform teams bring to an organization. Management will be able to clearly distinguish between high-performing platform teams and mediocre ones, enabling better recognition and support for their contributions. By proving their impact, platform teams can solidify their position as strategic assets within the organization. A few examples of such tools are Shoreline, developer experience tools (LogRocket, Request Metrics), service health dashboards (DataDog, New Relic), Internal Developer Portals (Backstage, Port, Humanitec), cost analysis tools (Infracost, Finout, CloudZero).
Conclusion
2025 is shaping up to be a transformative year for IaC. Trends indicate a future where operations and development teams collaborate more closely, driving innovation toward more efficient, secure, and simplified infrastructure management. It will be interesting to see how we can tame complex infrastructure in 2025. Oh, and there is AI too :)